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Because it's a 17W TDP i7, which indicates Atom architecture inside. The article is currently comparing an 18W TDP Fusion chip with an 8W TDP (old) Atom part with way less RAM, which is actually showing a great performance from the Atom chip to me.

No, the i7 indicates it is the i7 (Nehalem) architecture. Not an Atom chip. Also, even though the TDP rating is the same, it will consume quite a bit more power. In exchange, it is much faster.

Because it's a 17W TDP i7, which indicates Atom architecture inside. The article is currently comparing an 18W TDP Fusion chip with an 8W TDP (old) Atom part with way less RAM, which is actually showing a great performance from the Atom chip to me.

I think it is fair to do this comparison. After all, Atom 330 + Ion boards are still on sale and have a similarprice. The difference in RAM is not so important for compute benchmarks. And considering the difference in power consumption for the whole platform still makes the E-350 appear more efficient.

From the article: "...but even still with the latest Catalyst drivers the XvBA/video implementation can be buggy depending upon several factors."

Can anyone with this or similar hardware expand on this? I mainly have desktops, and nearly all have nvidia (for obvious reasons), so if I were to buy this board, what would I find in terms of hardware video decoding?
I know flash won't work (don't really care either), but would XBMC work? And mplayer?

What? Oh I see, this is about E-350 is it? Well, it's actually a very nice APU and in line with AMD's expectations in terms of performance. Faster than Atom and about 90% the performance of a Phenom II/Athlon II. If you divide the results by number of cores and clock speed it's easy to see that it has about the same performance as the Phenom II line with much lower power consumption. For example, on the first test doing this division results in 4.28 for the X3-710 and 4.19 for the E-350.

It's not like the E-350 is borderline for 720p, a CPU that is borderline for this kind of load is a single core Intel Atom (e.g. 230 or N270). The Atom 330 actually is capable of playing lower bitrate 1080p H.264 with a suitable decoder.